Former energy secretary speaks on climate change

Friday

Feb 21, 2014 at 4:37 PM

If you smoke and get lung cancer 20 years later, you might view your action as a matter of personal choice. But what if you knew that your smoking now would cause lung cancer in your grandchildren 50 years later?

Carolyn Krause/Special to The Oak Ridger

If you smoke and get lung cancer 20 years later, you might view your action as a matter of personal choice. But what if you knew that your smoking now would cause lung cancer in your grandchildren 50 years later?

Steven Chu presented this imaginary scenario as an analogy to human-induced global warming and climate change.

Chu, the longest-serving U.S. Secretary of Energy (January 2009 through April 2013) and winner of a Nobel Prize in physics in 1997, spoke about climate change as part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Eugene P. Wigner Distinguished Lecture Series in Science, Technology and Policy. Chu is currently a professor at Stanford University.

“There is a delay in climate change as the atmosphere and ocean heat up,” he said, noting that the water temperature at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is 35 degrees, but the surface temperature is 86 degrees in summer.

“It may take 100 years to heat up this huge thermal mass so it reaches a uniform temperature,” he said. “The damage we’ve done today will not be seen for at least 50 years.”

He showed the audience a slide of the earth’s surface temperature record from 1800 to 2011.

“The globe is warming up,” he said, acknowledging that the temperature rise has leveled off in the past 12 years for reasons not yet understood.

The temperature rise has been steepest since 1980, Chu said. Scientists have attributed this trend to the sharp increases in emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, from the growth in fossil fuel power production and in transportation using fuels made from oil.

Chu cited the melting of glaciers in the Arctic and the heat wave in 2003 in Europe that killed 52,000 people as dramatic examples of a changing climate.

Reinsurance companies, which sell insurance to companies that sell it, have tracked extreme events that trigger large insurance company losses, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, tornados and floods.

The extreme events that have been “trending upwards” in number are weather-related, Chu said, adding that the number of violent storms is higher over the past 50 years compared with previous 50-year periods in weather records.

The costs of hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, he noted, have included the weatherization of levies and subways and the closure of many small businesses. In addition, U.S. government-backed flood insurance has contributed $26 billion to the national debt.

“If you include ethanol production in the U.S., we are the largest producer of transportation liquids in the world,” Chu said. “We will not run out of oil, gas and coal anytime soon.”

To slow the use of fossil fuels, Chu suggested “better solutions,” such as increased use of energy-efficient appliances. He argued that tighter energy standards have not only improved the efficiency of refrigerators, room air conditioners and clothes washers but also lowered their cost.

Chu also favors requiring industry to capture and sequester carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of natural gas and coal at a cost $15 to 20 a ton. He noted that ground and remote sensors detect leaks of carbon gas from pipes and underground reservoirs.

“If a company captures carbon from the stack and pumps it underground and if the company shows with its sensor data that half of the carbon stays there for 100 years, we should give the company credit for carbon capture and its sequestration as it occurs,” Chu said.

In his introduction of Chu, ORNL Director Thom Mason said that as head of the Department of Energy, Chu had a beneficial impact on the Oak Ridge lab through the creation of Energy Innovation Hubs and ARPA-E (for advanced, high-risk energy research), as well as the tenfold increase in solar energy funding.

For President Obama, Chu led a team of researchers that assisted BP in finding ways to stop the Deepwater Horizon oil wellhead leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

Chu also spoke about the research he is performing with others on bacterial biofilms that can cause fatal infections and signaling to neurons to lock in memories and to cells to turn them cancerous.